Work law ad blitz may cost $100m

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Taxpayers may be slugged up to $100 million for an advertising blitz to sell them the Howard Government's dramatic rewrite of industrial relations laws.

With the states today expected to declare plans for a joint High Court challenge to the federal bid to seize their powers, the chairman of the federal taskforce selling the changes has tipped a big-spending campaign.

"I expect (the level of expenditure) to be consistent with similar other major policy changes like the GST," Liberal MP Andrew Robb told The Age yesterday.

"This is a very important program and we've got a responsibility to explain it; just like when a company makes a significant policy change, they have to go to shareholders and tell them what they're doing and why. Communicating it is as much part of change as the change itself."

The advertising costs for the GST campaign have been put at more than $100 million.

The main messages in the forthcoming TV, radio and print campaign will be that the changes will protect workers' rights, create jobs and retain the Australian way of life.

Mr Robb said while some workers had flexibility at the moment to hold on to their way of life, the point of the changes would be to extend that flexibility to the whole workforce.

But ACTU secretary Greg Combet said the message was a con. "The strategy, to try and be reassuring, is really quite laughable," he told ABC radio. "What the Government is proposing to do is to force people to bargain for things that are currently legally guaranteed."

Federal Labor's industrial relations spokesman Stephen Smith said it was now clear the Government was preparing to spend more than $175 million on its advertising campaign.

"However much they spend it's an outrageous waste of taxpayers' money — this is a Liberal Party advertising campaign and the Liberal Party should pay for it," he said.

The debate over advertising comes as federal Workplace Relations Minister Kevin Andrews prepares to meet his state counterparts in Melbourne today. Mr Andrews will ask them to refer their powers to make laws on industrial relations to the Commonwealth — a request that will be denied.

South Australian Premier Mike Rann and new NSW Premier Morris Iemma have already committed themselves publicly to a High Court challenge over the federal plans. Other states and territories are expected to throw their weight behind the challenge.

Victorian Industrial Relations Minister Rob Hulls last night demanded a written guarantee that no worker would be worse off under the new laws.

But Prime Minister John Howard has repeatedly refused to give such a guarantee.

"But what I can guarantee is this," he said. "That this Government is not going to introduce any policy that is going to result in a cut in the take-home pay or living standards of the Australian workforce."

Meanwhile, South Australian Industrial Relations Minister Michael Wright attacked Mr Andrews personally, saying the states have no respect for someone selling changes so deceitfully.

Mr Andrews said the Government had been completely open about its plans. He demanded the states stop posturing and hand over their powers in the national interest.